Coming Soon – January 2026
This popular Switch Classroom video is one of our all-time teacher and student favorites. It’s being completely remade with the latest data, new visuals, and updated insights so you’ll have even more engaging, accurate content for your classroom.

Transcript:

[Dr. Scott W. Tinker] From the Switch Energy Alliance, the three Es. We’ll look at the importance of energy, talk about how energy and the environment and the economy are tightly linked, and then we’ll think about the radical middle and the critical thinking required to address major issues. We know that energy has had a transformational impact on the quality of human life. We see this in developed economies and the remarkable advances that are made because of energy. We know that energy impacts many world issues today from housing and hunger, healthcare and water, the things you would expect, education, reduced fertility rates, the status and empowerment of women, immigration and migration, climate change. It impacts many major issues in the world today. We can’t underestimate the importance of energy. It’s one of the most important issues of our time. Where does energy play? Well, it plays with the environment and the economy in a way that is hard to underestimate. The legal, social, political systems are very interactive, not simple. Population, land, water, air, atmosphere on the environmental side. Poverty, competition, and growth. Fossils, nuclear energy, renewable energy. These things all play together in what I call the radical middle. It’s radical because it’s sometimes kind of lonely. It seems everybody wants to be out on the fringe, but the productive work, the compromises, the data, the civil discourse, the major world challenges happen in that overlap space. It takes critical thinking to address some of the big issues that we’re talking about here at the heart of the three Es. Ask yourself, can poor nations afford to invest in the environment? What are some of the toughest environments we’ve seen in the world? It’s where the economies are poor. Some of the best environments are where they’re wealthy, and these are large major economies consuming remarkable amounts of energy because they can afford to clean up the air and the water and the land. Energy, the environment, and the economy. The three Es. Are we going to continue to allow them to pull apart? Or are we going to pull them together? Are we going to work together to address some of these major issues? Major issues like reducing the impacts of all forms of energy on all forms of the environment, land, air, water, and atmosphere; ending energy poverty globally; moving all economies to what we’ve called level four, $12,000 a year or more, the higher wealthier economies in the world; transitioning from coal to natural gas; growing the nuclear; distributed renewables in places in the world where they don’t have other options; energy efficiency. Things that will have major effect on both atmospheric emissions, local air emissions, land, and water. It takes critical thinking. It’s required to look at the pros and cons of all these issues. Energy, the environment, and the economy are very tightly linked. Critical thinking is critically important. The transition must involve the economy and the environment. We can’t just look at the atmosphere or just at land or just at water. We can’t just look at keeping wealthy nations wealthy. We have to look at lifting everyone up, and this can be done. Join us at the Switch Energy Alliance. Help us inspire an energy educated future.